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'Top Gun' Tests Radar for Mars

Between 2006 and 2011, engineers from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., conducted a series of aerial tests on the radar that will be used to land NASA's Curiosity rover on Mars. Using a NASA Dryden F/A-18 Hornet and a Eurocopter AS350 helicopter, they tested the radar's performance at different altitudes and velocities over a simulated Martian terrain in the Southern California high desert.